Air

dir: Ben Affleck

2023

A generous way to talk about this flick is to describe it as a mildly entertaining biopic about the guy who put together the deal that resulted in the creation of the Air Jordan basketball shoe, which changed the game as it related both to sneakers as consumer products and the arrangements basketball stars would have with merchandising companies for ever more.

A less generous approach would be to say it’s a movie about a fucking shoe.

This is Australia. We used to call them runners, no matter their purpose, though I guess the kids of today probably don’t call them that. But, yes, back in the day, whether they were Dunlop Volleys or branded stuff with logos or the knockoffs you got from the Victoria Market, we called them runners, regardless of how much or little running you actually did in them

I’ve never owned a pair of Air Jordans. I’ve never really aspired to own a pair, and, to be more accurate, have rarely been in a position to be able to afford a pair. Taking out a mortgage in order to secure a pair of shoes designed for basketball players, being a sport I do not play, seems extravagant even for me, and I waste money on all sorts of nonsense. But I know what they are. I know of them. Billions of people know what they are. Surely that means they are important, as, I dunno, some kind of cultural artefact?

I mean, I just wrote that, and I’m not really convinced. It’s a thing, a highly sought after thing that has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Nike and millions of dollars for Michael Jordan personally, but so fucking what? Tulips, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, iPods, Harry Potter books, all sorts of useless crap have generated billions of dollars for a select few.

And there’s no pseudo-docos about them. I guess I should be talking about the flick more in line with how Tetris approached the topic, being less about the money, and more about the unlikely result (of besting the combined fury of the mighty USSR and mogul Robert Maxwell in order to steal some computer program from them).

Remembering perhaps with some error I’m misremembering a scene from Dangerous Liaisons where the loathsome Valmont points out that, as a master seducer, the whole point of the endeavour of seduction is not, from his perspective, convincing one of his conquests as to how much he wants to sleep with them. They know. The point is to convince THEM about how much they want to sleep with HIM.

Okay, so if it’s not just really about a fucking shoe, it’s about the person that dreamed a dream and made it happen, something almost impossible, in order for the rest of us to relate to it. The billions, well, not so relatable to us nickel and dimers.

It’s really about Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a chap who works for Nike in the 1980s, who really loves basketball, who saw something no-one else could at the right time.

They’re not pretending he is some dynamic, charming, effervescent guy. He’s played, by Damon, as something of a true believer, but a sadsack, a shlub, a loser. Probably not anywhere near the reality of what he’s like, but the Hollywood version of “sadsack”, not the “our” versions of what sadsacks actually look and smell like.

This is a time when Nike have a small share of the sneaker market, behind the other two titans, being Converse and Adidas. People wear Nikes to jog, People buy and wear Adidas and Converse to do absolutely everything else, including play basketball but also to aspire to be like basketball players.

A young Michael Jordan, who we never actually see, who is more like a Michael Jordan-shaped absence in the fabric of reality, has no reason to sign with Nike. Nike, in the personification of its odd creator Phil Knight (Affleck, putting in one of his oddest and spikiest performances to date), is wondering whether it needs a basketball shoe division at all. No-one buys its basketball range, because none of the NBA stars wear them, goes the logic.

So Sonny wonders if he can snare someone who the proles and the pundits all think could be one of the next greats, maybe it will turn around Nike’s fortunes. Maybe it will give meaning to his sad fucking life. Maybe it will save the jobs of the rest of the division, people, humans with jobs and families and hopes and aspirations. Maybe it will create a lasting blah blah fucking legacy.

Whatever. Like all these kinds of flicks, even if it was in actuality something fairly basic, they have to make it look like it was the most complex bank heist in human history. How do you get to Michael Jordan? His agent (Chris Messina), an absolute prick of a human being, refuses to even bring an offer to Jordan. No-one internally believes Sonny is ever going to make it happen, nor will they give him any of the resources he could use in order to snare this once in a lifetime opportunity. And I think at one point they let down the tyres on his Malvern Star bicycle, or put sugar in his gas tank, just to make it that much harder.

Also, he’s told the only way to get to Michael is through his parents, but that he should never contact his parents, because that would be bad, because of reasons. So naturally he flies out to North Carolina in order to have a nice chat with Momma Jordan.

Now this isn’t really a compromise, but it’s funny to me that Michael Jordan himself only agreed for this flick to go ahead if the makers, being Affleck and Damon, got Viola Davis to play his mother. The fact is, pretty much anything Jordan wanted he probably got, and that’s what you do when you’re the greatest and richest sportsman of all time thanks to a society that turns celebrities into very profitable gods from whom maximum return is extracted.

Look, you know, if I was in Michael Jordan’s position, I too would insist that Viola David play my mother in the loosely fictionalised retelling of my formative years. She probably doesn’t look like my mum very much, but I am certain, after watching her in the bloody The Woman King, as the fiercest Dahomie General of all time, that she could probably do really well playing a 4 foot old Greek woman. She is that talented.

She is great here, but mostly she swans around with a slightly amused expression on her face. Of course they would never stoop to portray her in a negative light, because who would dare, but you wonder – is Jordan’s mum a super savvy businessman getting maximum value for her son’s efforts because she knows his worth, or is she just an absolute saint of a woman, or both? Hmm, tough decisions to make.

The beauty of Damon and Davis’s scenes together is that Sonny isn’t in a position to trick or monster these people, and he also doesn’t have enough smoke to blow up their arses. He also doesn’t have a blank cheque to up the ante, he has very little, except for his deep knowledge of basketball and of his competitors.

I love the way, again probably fictionalised, where he convinces Mother Jordan that if they go with the other companies, Michael will just be part of their stable of stars, one of many, another face in the crowd, having to compete for space and column inches with Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and the other titans of the day. He knows the peccadilloes and peculiarities of the high ups in Converse and Adidas, and tells Momma Jordan exactly what they’re going to say to her, and what her questions should be.

This of course isn’t enough to sway them entirely, but it does get him a seat at their table, so that Michael will be compelled (by his parents) to have a meeting with Nike even though he has no intention of ever signing with them.

If I make it sound like a plot driven flick (as one think I implied given the reference to Tetris, which is all plot, all drive), this flick is far more about the relationships Sonny had with the people around him, and the ones he tried to build with the Jordans, and why it worked.

It worked for similar reasons as to why the flick works overall. He has friendships with people at Nike that mean it’s not just about getting a particular win, and not continue to being seen as a loser, but about making this work in order to support his friends as well. His relationship with division head Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) makes it seem like, given the chance to talk about what the job means to him now that his marriage has fallen apart, he understands that if none of this works and Rob loses his job, he’ll lose a part of what makes his visits with his daughter special in these Divorced Dad times. Also, like a lot of the relationships in the flick, it feels organic and unforced.

His relationship with Phil Knight is somewhat different. As played here, Affleck elects to make Knight look and sound like the weirdo he probably is, so their relationship isn’t an easy going one, with a kind of awkward energy to it, because neither Sonny nor the audience can predict whatever the fuck is about to come out of Affleck’s mouth.

It’s also his relationships with two other key characters, one being Nike vice president Howard White (Chris Tucker), who is pointedly the only African-American in the room when the parents have their Nike meeting, the other being George Raveling (Marlon Wayans), who was the best man at one of Sonny’s weddings.

The status or importance of any of those marriages plays no part in this movie, but we are given the impression that they were at one point good friends. Raveling’s importance in the flick is that he gives Sonny a sage piece of advice based on something frankly unbelievable, but good lord, what a fucking anecdote. It could be one of the greatest anecdotes of all time, and its point, which isn’t lost on Sonny, and isn’t lost on us, is that if Sonny is going to give a pitch to the Jordans, a pre-prepared one, and he feels it’s not working, he needs to pivot and feel what it is that his audience (not us, but kind of us as well) needs to hear.

So we do get to that moment where, with the benefit of foresight, Sonny tells the Jordans what’s going to happen going into the 1990s, and what an absolute champion Michael is definitely going to be, but that if he signs with Nike, together they can ensure that the world doesn’t just see MJ as one of the greats, but as the greatest of all time. The rest of us will be forgotten, but MJ, and Air Jordans by default, will be around (in landfills) forever.

It's a speech worthy of Don Draper from Mad Men at his absolute sharpest, most convincing, most seductive. He conjures a vision splendid that of course we know will transpire, but maybe his audience had their doubts.

And Damon sells it, in his desperate sweaty way, and only time will tell if it actually worked.

Who knows, I certainly don’t. Regardless of its subject matter, this is a low key flick with mostly (except for Phil Knight) lowkey performances, and they all do okay with their modest goals. Every 1980s needle drop you could possibly imagine definitely happens, each more cliché than the last, such that I had to check the radio wasn’t on in the room playing Gold 104 (“Hits from the 80s and never anytime else”). The interiors of the Nike offices are suitably drab.

Damon’s fatsuit is noteworthy. It’s a competent film. Whatever mistakes Ben Affleck has made as a person or as an actor, his output as a director continues to be remarkably solid, and even if it’s in the service of an aspirational object, it’s a story well told, and I enjoyed it.

8 times I’m more of an Onitsuka Tigers guy myself out of 10

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“A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it.” – ew who stepped in this heap of bullshit - Air